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14 months ago, the CEO of Chicago-based Braintree, a Web and mobile payment processing service, told me that he thought his company could be worth $1 billion. On September 26, he got 80% of the way there when eBay announced a deal to pay $800 million for Braintree.

Braintree processes over $12 billion a year in payments -- $4 billion of which are mobile -- for the likes of Rovio, Uber, OpenTable, Fab, Airbnb, TaskRabbit and Heroku. And PayPal president, David Marcus, told the New York Times that he was impressed with Braintree's "obsession with removing friction for next-generation commerce." Marcus also likes its mobile growth and its international reach.

In a July 2012 interview with Braintree CEO, Bill Ready, I learned how the company got its odd name. When Bryan Johnson, started the company in 2007, Johnson wanted to build an online payments company that would differ from the competition because its fees would be transparent — it would target developers and its customer service would be outstanding — Zappos-like.

Johnson, a history buff, wanted to give the company a name that would sound stable, important, trustworthy and would enable him to attract top developers.

Rather than call it something like International Payments Technologies – a name that would not appeal to developers — Johnson decided to name it Braintree, the home town of Presidents John Adams and John Quincy Adams.

Ready has a stellar pedigree. After Harvard Business School, he worked for McKinsey’s private equity practice in payments, and took over iPay Technologies — taking 40% of the bank payment processing market — before selling the company to Jack Henry Associates.

Ready joined Accel Partners as an executive in residence. In June 2011, Accel invested $34 million in Braintree and he went on its board. In conversations with Johnson, it became clear that they worked well together and that Johnson was looking for help to expand Braintree’s product and market share. Ready agreed to step in as CEO and Johnson became Chairman.

When I spoke with Ready, he saw that mobile commerce was growing at twice the rate of online and that mobile users could be twice as likely to purchase with the right payment experience. Therefore, being a leader in m-payments could make Braintree worth at least $1 billion.

Braintree was growing fast by addressing the hot button issues of developers and executives. Developers wanted a payments platform that was quick to integrate into their operations. Executives looked for a payments company to scale without a high incremental cost while maintaining high service quality.

Ready focused on building Braintree’s mobile client libraries — then at nearly $1 billion in mobile volume — and expanded its international reach — moving the company into 30 countries in Europe, Latin America, and Asia.

His goal was to make Braintree the iOS of payments. By that, Ready meant that he wanted Braintree’s technology to be like Apple’s operating system — a way to make all the complexity of the payments infrastructure easier for developers to access without requiring them to know all of its nuts and bolts.

Ready ultimate goal was for Braintree to make m-payments history by “unleash[ing] the innovation of thousands of developers that will create the applications and experiences that drive the shift from e-commerce to m-commerce.”

And now Ready will have a chance to pursue that history-making goal as part of eBay. He will report to Marcus and Braintree's 200 people will remain in Chicago and the Braintree brand will be separate from PayPal's for the time being, according to TechCrunch.

Braintree received interest from other potential acquirers but Ready did picked PayPal not because of “who offered the most dollars, but where could [the acquirer and Braintree could] go and build for the next decade of commerce,” Ready told TechCrunch.

And for PayPal, one of the attractions of this deal was Venmo, the mobile payments service for which Braintree paid $26 million in 2012.

It remains to be seen whether the combination with PayPal will give developers -- whom Marcus and Ready cherish -- the tools they need to build "a whole new wave of commerce experiences."